Saturday, 27 September 2014

I know they say you can’t take it with
you, but I’m going to be buried with a suitcase full of money just in case you
can.

Jackie
MasonMoney can drive some people out of their minds.

The O’Jays, For the Love of MoneyA short while from now, a London nurse visits an
ATM the day after payday to discover she is unable to draw any money from her
account. Assuming the ATM, or the bank’s IT system, is at fault, she tries
another. The result is the same, as it is with all the ATMs within walking
distance of her flat. Nearby, a soldier has the same problem, as do teachers,
social workers, traffic wardens and a young Serbian council worker whose job is
to send recycling bags to local residents. There is no money in their accounts because
they have not been paid, and they have not been paid because there is no money
to pay them, and there is no money to pay them because no one will lend any
more money to the UK,
which is now bankrupt.

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a
boom brought about by credit expansion.

Nick Land, Suspended Animation

Meanwhile,
a pensioner is trying to get his television to work in his poorly heated flat,
unaware that his pension has not been paid into his account any more than the
Incapacity Benefit usually received by his noisy, aggressive neighbours. For
some reason, the electricity has gone off, although he has topped up his key.
It may be a trip switch, and he has tried to phone his son. His son knows about
the electrics, but the phone network is telling him to try again later.

Astronomy came out of astrology. Chemistry came out of
alchemy. What will come out of economics?

Bernard Lewis in conversation

Two
miles to the West, the wife of a politician is tearfully packing expensive crockery
into a cardboard box. She feels very, very guilty, but doesn’t understand why.
After all, it was her husband and his colleagues who kept quiet about the
simultaneous collapse of the Bank of England, the downgrading of the UK’s credit rating to junk-bond status, and the
flight of capital to Switzerland.
It wasn’t her, although she knew. In Zurich,
there are no more bank vaults available and, across the border in Italian
hotels, there is a lucrative trade springing up in the rental of strong-boxes.

Arguably, this collection of essays is
remarkable less for what it includes as what it so markedly excludes. There is
nothing here on economics (other than a projection of forthcoming financial
collapse…)

Michael
Walker, review of Michael O’Meara’s Toward
the White Republic

Ten
days after the tills stopped ringing in Oxford Street, every shop has been looted
(with the exception of Waterstone’s, the book shop) and gangs run the streets.
There are no police officers to be seen. They have not been paid. The first
PCSOs assigned to keep order in south London
were beaten to death with claw hammers taken from PoundLand.

When the music stops, in terms of
liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing,
you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.

Chuck
Prince, former CEO of Citigroup (retirement payout: $40 million), from an
interview with the FT

On a
seasteading development off the Cayman Islands, in non-territorial waters, hedge-fund
traders are joining Hollywood starlets and
arms dealers for cocktails and canapés. From the BoddenTown district of Grand Cayman, thick
black plumes of smoke stand out against the Caribbean
blue of the sky. BoddenTown is not the financial centre of the Cayman Islands.

It is a fact; decadence is far more
expensive than prosperity.

Guillaume
Faye, Why We Fight

In
the garden of a European Commission building in Brussels, next to a commemorative
chunk of the Berlin wall, a cat picks at the rotting tendons of a financial expert
who died while working on a series of bail-outs, fiscal stimuli and contingency
plans for the euro. He was shot in the head by his own bodyguard, a Sunni
Muslim who had never felt easy about working for a financier who sanctioned
interest payments on capital.

If capital cannot earn a normal rate of
return in an activity, capital is not supplied to that activity.

Paul
Craig Roberts, The Failure of Laissez
Faire Capitalism

London’s
streets are littered with broken glass sprinkled with jewellery. No one even
bothers to steal. There is no one to whom to sell the goods and nowhere to
spend any money it might be sold for. Like the dogs, foxes and cats, whose
populations are now beginning what will be an exponential rise in urban areas,
each day, for each person remaining, represents a set of difficult and often
fruitless tasks designed to obtain food. People try to catch the feral animals,
but they are too fast for the steadily weakening, dwindling urban population.
Soon, the animals will realise that they have the upper hand and, as they too
must eat, they will turn on the slow, diseased street people, which all but the
seasteaders have become. The dog no longer cowers before the man, no longer
runs. The fox has a different set of skills now, no longer afraid of men.

Our cultural empire has the addicted…
clamouring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.

Major
Ralph Peters, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence

From
a basement apartment, its rice-cake-thin door flapping on buckled hinges, the fading
sound of a song can just be heard as the batteries in a CD player eke out their
last power to propel the Scotch-and-gravel voice of Tom Waits into the Autumn
evening.

Baby I’m gonna stay wit’ you

Till the money runs out.

The
sky becomes darker, the gradual arrival of night hard to notice in its incremental
advance, but total and stifling when it finally descends.

Saturday, 20 September 2014

In
1956, a bookish young man wrote his debut in the BritishMuseum.
His day’s work done, the poor 24-year-old would sleep on London’s Hampstead Heath. Colin Wilson died
almost two years ago, but his book, The
Outsider, is still very much alive.

Wilson
became driven by literature while at school, an archaic notion now. Leaving
education at 16, he eschewed university and immersed himself fully in the
written word. This is what gives The
Outsider its authentic tone. It has none of the antiseptic tang of the
university about it, but instead is redolent of the rich aromas which will
always be a friend to the true autodidact.

The Outsider
began life as a novel before Wilson
saw he had the framework of a book on the figure of the alienated étranger in Western literature. As an
artefact from the decade prior to that in which Western cultural decadence
properly began, The Outsider can be
read both with an awareness that it was a reaction against a society long gone,
never to return, and with a complementary awareness that the reaction itself –
a paean to literature, alienation, intellectual elitism and Sartrean bad faith
– is no longer possible in our contemporary world, in which commodity has
triumphed over the self.

Wilson
keeps his efficient forays into philosophy to a working minimum; there are none
of today’s whistle-stop tours of Wikipedia leavening the elegant prose. The book is largely exposition and
comment, and no worse for this simple approach, reading like an introductory
primer to the writers discussed. This is not a criticism but an endorsement. A
teenager today, if he reads at all outside of the internet and magazine-based
ephemera, is faced with an ocean of garishly-covered ‘novels’ when he actually needs,
if only he knew it, to be acquainted with all the writers and artists discussed
and dissected in The Outsider.

Coming
at it again after thirty years, I read The
Outsider as a notebook from a lost continent. Who, nowadays, reads Sartre
and Dostoevsky, Eliot and William James, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Nijinsky or
van Gogh? Literature, like other cultural areas, has been arranged for us now,
and there is no need to delve into the intellectually challenging unknown. Far
easier to stick with popular science from the pen of Brian Cox, Leftist history
as automatic writing from the pianola roll of lifestyle journalists, ChickLit,
TV spin-offs, Fifty Shades of Harry Potter. Personally, I am happy with this
arrangement. Like the estate owner shaking his fist at passing ramblers and
cursing the quad-bikes and pop festivals on his land, I would be unhappy if the
amoebic pseudopods of what passes for modern culture invaded the Elysian fields
of what I consider to be my territory. Fortunately, I need not worry. The
saving grace of great literature is that much of it is difficult to understand,
the combination of the lock is beyond a reader armed only with a Gender Studies
degree, a copy of The Guardian, and
Owen Jones’s new book. Wilson
quotes Jakob Boehme to this effect;

“If
you are not a spiritual self-surmounter, let my book alone. Don’t meddle with
it, but stick to your usual nonsense.”

The Outsider is
sub-titled An inquiry into the sickness
of mankind in the mid-twentieth century… Mankind is past the sickness stage
now, exhibiting all the symptoms of a Nietzschean malaise which believes itself
to be in a state of rude health, and this most dangerous of conditions does not
affect Outsiders, in literature or anywhere else, but is carried virally by
insiders, by the new establishment, the new inquisitors of the socio-cultural
wars. As the Arabic proverb puts it; Better
a thousand enemies outside the house than one enemy inside…

Wilson is
fresh and relevant again because there is so little modern culture offers. It is there, between the box sets and the
bling, the lifestyle magazines and the edgy BBC dramas, but time needs to be
put aside to find it, and time is being targeted by a cultural offensive
sponsored by the elites and designed to relieve you of the burden of creative
or inquiring thought. It is not difficult to imagine a time in which readers of
serious literature will begin to be viewed as mentally suspect. As T S Eliot (a
constant Virgil to Wilson’s
Dante in The Outsider) wrote; Mankind cannot bear very much reality.

In
our clearly insane age, it is useful than insanity stalks the book; we observe
an Outsiders’ asylum containing Strindberg, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Rimbaud,
Nietzsche. This is the danger of courting the intellect. Love never really
drove anyone clinically insane; it is left to the extremities of thought to
achieve that. As Wilson
writes,

“As
far as the Outsider is concerned, it is more important to have a powerful
intellect than a highly developed capacity to ‘feel’.”

If Wilson were writing now, although
he would find plenty of putative Outsiders in the psychotic moral universe of
televisual drama, there are scarcely any among writers or artists. I could only
come up with a shortlist of Michel Houellebecq, Takuan Seiyo and Mark E Smith.

Wilson’s
reading is a glorious patchwork, incomplete (he doesn’t mention Robert Musil’s
Moosbrugger in The Man Without Qualities)
and partisan, and this is why it has life, still. The Outsider is essential reading for any enquiring mind
unacquainted with the literature of existentialism. If your children don’t read
literary classics they risk forfeiting a full imaginative, engaged mental life.
This is scarcely scientific, and the canon of ethnocentrism would now be
wheeled out by the progressives and trained on Wilson as too white, too male, too elitist,
too bookish. But a bookish turn can
furnish and fashion a person. To breathe the air of the literature of
estrangement, perhaps it might be wise, with regard to Wilson’s book, to act on
the suggestion made by a child in a garden in the fifth century, overheard by
St Augustine, and applied to his Bible; Take
up the book and read…

Saturday, 13 September 2014

“I
had rather be with you,” he said, “in your solitary rambles, than with these
Scotch people, whom I do not know…”

Mary
Shelley, Frankenstein

One
of the greatest of Englishmen, Dr Johnson, used to tease his Scotch friend and biographer,
Thomas Boswell, by informing him that the greatest thing to come out of Scotland was the road that led to England. This
week, for our triumvirate of leaders – who look like some ghastly boy band
reforming for a comeback tour – the greatest thing to come out of England appears to be the road to Scotland.

Of
course, the ‘No’ campaign may be justifiably horrified that three of the
kingdom’s most unpopular men are en route to the land of heather and deep-fried
Mars Bars to add their wholly unconstitutional weight to the debate. On a
personal note, I don’t believe that my tax money is supposed to pay for a
coalition of parties to send their woeful leaders to campaign on the same side
for an outcome which ought to be left to the Scottish people. But if there is
one thing the European political class believes should be outlawed, it is the
referendum. If it were an EU process, a ‘yes’ vote would simply lead to the nation
being invited to re-sit the examination, as with Ireland.

On
the issue of Scottish independence, I don’t have a dog in the fight, not so
much as a Highland terrier. It would be
pleasant to see the rictus faces of the Maoists running the EU if the Scots
decide to go it alone, but it’s nice not to care about an issue, marooned as we
are in these days of hashtag activism, morality by T-shirt slogan, and the
penny arcade of compulsory opinion that the internet has become. Concerning the
referendum, as Bertie Wooster would say, one simply shakes one head and passes
on.

The
interest, as ever, lies in the narrative. Why are the ruling class and their
attendant media so appalled by the idea of Scottish independence? The media
class despise England, and
one might think that plucky little Scotland snubbing the imperial host
might appeal. But this has not been the theme of endless column inches warning
off the Scots from voting yes which have super-saturated news coverage this
past week.

Islamic
State’s press officer must be at his wit’s end. No one’s returning his calls and,
despite cutting off heads at a Stakhanovite rate, they just can’t make the UK front pages.
Personally, I miss my quota of bloody murder in the name of political ideology,
but made up for it by reading Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s masterful biography of
Stalin, In the Court of the Red Tsar. Did
you know Vladimir Putin’s grandfather was a chef who cooked for Lenin, Stalin
and Rasputin? Well, there we are. You do now.

But
to return to the media offensive against the potential audacity of a Scottish
‘yes’ vote. The headlines rang with the kind of Biblical imperatives usually
reserved for climate change. ‘Ten days to save the Union’, ‘Fly the flag to
save Scotland’,
‘One last desperate plea.’ You don’t have to search for a sub-text here; the
text itself is riding around in a brightly coloured clown car for all to see.

This
issue of Scottish independence has divided the online community, as you might
expect, along sectarian lines. Broadly, the Left are against it and what I
think of as the dissident Right (with apologies to John Derbyshire), as well as
Libertarians (within which I broadly include myself) are for it if it is the democratic expression of the Scots.
And democratic expression is what a referendum is, which is why the ruling
class finds it all so pesky. What on earth, they think, are the great unwashed
doing getting involved in political decision-making? Demos may mean 'people' and kratos
may mean 'power', but ‘democracy’ is a portmanteau word that the elites
would like to see go the way of ‘antimacassar’ and ‘stagecoach’.

As
for the sudden panic at polls indicating that the ‘yes’ campaign has recently narrowed
the gap to near-parity, we simply note Peter Hitchens’ insight that opinion
polls are as often as not designed to engineer voting behaviour and not to
record it.

In
passing, who maintains a calm dignity above the melée? Why, the same woman who
will reign on once Cameron has left number 10 for the first of his lucrative
and bland post-prime ministerial speaking engagements, and Nick Clegg – a man
there is no excuse for – has left the country he hates to enjoy his EU pension
pot; Queen Elizabeth. The Palace issued a wonderfully starched snub to those
media Johnnies who were impertinent enough to suggest that the monarch was
somehow fighting for the union (and the Queen has a well-documented fondness
for Scotland).
The Queen, leading by example as always. And that, gentle reader, is why I’m a
monarchist.

And
so the political class continues its deranged odyssey, in thrall to the
Guardianistas of Islington, believing that it believes, sewing together patches
and scraps of ideology into a raggedy man of conviction. What it is that it
thinks it wants from the union is beyond me but, like a child grasping at a toy
which lies out of reach, want it they do.

To
return to where we started (although not necessarily to know the place for the
first time) with the man who should be England’s patron saint, Dr Johnson.
The big man was fond of quoting Piozzi on the subject of Scotland;

“Knowledge
was divided among the Scots, like bread in a besieged town, to every man a
mouthful, to no man a bellyful.”

Whichever
way the Scottish electorate decide to use their knowledge (and I imagine that
the nation’s sub-editors have been banned from allowing the word ‘canny’ to
appear in print), it is their choice, and they should treat the English media,
as well as the three stooges of Westminster, like the bampots they are.

*
Title of a poem by Lord Byron, as I’m sure you know, you literary eggheads,
you.

Saturday, 6 September 2014

I shall suppose… some
evil genius… has employed all his energies in deceiving me.René
Descartes, MeditationsThe defection of Clacton MP Douglas
Carswell from the Conservative Party to UKIP actually took place, no matter how
much Tory high command tried to smother the news with the antics of IS, the
latest Frankenstein’s monster of the Western governing class. Carswell is
intelligent (see his The Plan with
Daniel Hannan) and appears principled, although he was caught out in the
expenses scandal. Nigel Farage will have much to learn from the arriviste.

The closing of mainstream
media (MSM) ranks in their treatment of UKIP has only, as you might expect,
been noted outside the MSM. Whatever the destiny of the party branded (a word
we will return to) by Cameron as one of ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet
racists’, they and their talismanic leader Nigel Farage have already had a
curious and powerful effect on Westminster; they have introduced the concept of
the real.

This is not to say that
Farage or his people are real in the sense that you or I might use the word. It
may be that Farage’s image-makers have a more intuitive grasp of what ordinary
people see as ordinary, and produce that quasi-visual effect on the blank
canvas of their man. Politicians resemble those city pubs which do not look
like pubs to the seasoned drinker, but have been designed by branding gurus to
appeal to the tourist and their preconceived, televisual image of what a
British pub ought to look like. They are Potemkin pubs just as much of our
political class are Potemkin people.

On a related subject, pubs, beer
and cigarettes have played a curious supporting role in the current political
mummer’s play, paraded as they are as props denoting the real. The elites are
bound to have a paradoxical relationship with fags and booze. On the one hand
they denounce them as health hazards and A&E fillers, while the other hand
trousers the vast tax sums they generate. But as the synecdoche of the ‘ordinary
bloke’, cigarettes and beer – along with ubiquitous football - hold an
authoritative position. Synecdoche is the representation of the whole by the
part. Outside of language, in the realm of visual symbolism, it occurs when for
example the monarchy is represented by an image of a crown, or the sign for a
restaurant on a map is shown as a set of cutlery. For the Westminster PR,
smoke-and-mirrors image couturiers, nothing says ‘average chap, just like you
are’, as well as a snout and a bevy. A shame, then, that the elites elected to
take on Farage on what is apparently home turf.

Cameron and Clegg pictured
together in a boozer looked as comfortable as two dowagers at a rave. As for Ed
Miliband, a photo of him supping a pint looked like a man being forced to drink
paint. Farage is clearly at home in a pub. What’s interesting is the response
of the elites and their make-up artists. And Cameron himself had this to say;

“I don’t really accept this thing. He is a consummate
politician. We have seen that with his expenses and wife on the payroll and
everything else. So I don’t really accept that he’s a normal bloke down the pub
thing.”

Forget
the near-illiteracy of this statement from a serving Prime Minister, or the
tacit admission that a ‘consummate politician’ is a corrupt one, or the attempt
at matey language (the repeated use of ‘thing’). What is interesting is not
that Cameron rejects Farage’s image because it is false and produced. He does not.
He rejects it because it might be real,
and reality is not within the rules of the neo-Socialist Westminster game.

Even if Farage is one day
unmasked as the creation of a ruthless spin ‘n’ SpAd machine, even if the beer
and the fags and the ordinary bloke routine is as scripted as are the facades
of the other party leaders, the rise of UKIP will still have told us much about
the political elite and their courtiers in the media. In a way, it doesn’t
matter whether Farage’s image is real or not. The simple fact that people
believe it is has shocked and frightened the ruling class. Being real, being
unspun, is just not playing the game.

Nick Clegg – possibly the
most egregiously manufactured politico of our three ‘main’ leaders – could
barely disguise his contempt for Farage as he lost both his debates against
him. Of course, Clegg did not admit defeat because his client media told him he
won. It was only real people (another despised category for Clegg) who noticed
Farage’s dominance.

Cameron, of course, famously
branded UKIP a party of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists. We note in
passing that it was a standard gesture under Stalin to question the sanity of
your opponent. Contemporary Britain
is increasingly resembling Stalinist Russia without the gulags.

Farage, unfortunately, has
joined a world (he was a City broker) of illusion and cannot be completely free
of the image-building mechanism of the mainstream media (MSM). Thus, we find
documentary film maker Martin Durkin, who shadowed Farage to shoot a film about
him, apparently feigning astonishment that Farage is so normal, the perception
of normality being the grail of the Westminster PR machine. Durkin had the
following to say;

“There isn't a hidden side behind the bloke with
the pint. He is as he was as a boy, bolshie and perverse.”

The Daily Express liked that quote so much they
made it a pull-quote, that short, pithy sentence or two you see in a larger
font and designed to get you to read the whole piece. ‘Bolshy’ and ‘perverse’
certainly fit Farage. So much so, in fact, that in his autobiography, Flying Free, we read;

“I was an alarmingly normal, cricket-loving Kentish
boy – albeit a bolshy, argumentative and perverse one.” Objective journalism by
Durkin, or book marketing?

Many
years ago, media enfant terrible Julie
Burchill minted the term ‘amockalyptic’. Her target was the journalists and
writers eager to inform us of the inevitability of our doom, apparently merely
to get our attention and persuade us to buy their employers’ wares in the form
of a newspaper. This was pre-internet, and so all journalists were
‘conventional’ or ‘real’ (see the posting previous to this).

To
an extent, of course, this made for Burchill an enemy of almost the whole of
the print media. Disease, terrorism, global warming, crime, war, nuclear
disaster, flooding, paedophilia, migration, economic depression; the arsenal of
the amockalyptic scribbler is well stocked. But when does amockalypse become
apocalypse? And who are our Cassandras, ‘[prophesying] to my countrymen all their
disasters’?

It’s
a good time to be a futurologist; we are certainly living in interesting times,
geopolitically and economically speaking. But are we heading for apocalypse, of
whatever or all, variety? Or is it a case of Amockalypse Now? Welcome to
Traumaville. Here, the citizens are used to being cajoled about the latest
threat to Western civilisation. IS are this month’s bad guys, and it is their
image we see on our screens for the daily two-minute hate. But we should know
by now not to trust the conventional media, marionettes as they are of the
ruling elites. We must look elsewhere for our Cassandras.

Guillaume
Faye was a founder member of the predominantly French 1960s New Right (Nouvelle Droite). Disillusioned by the
much-vaunted events of 1968, this collective took a long-term view of the West
in response to, among others, Gramscians determined to complete the ‘long march
through the institutions’ fabled by the Left. Faye warned of what he called a
‘convergence of catastrophes’. From the book of the same name;

‘A
series of ‘dramatic lines’ are approaching one another and converging like a
river’s tributaries with perfect accord (between 2010 and 2020) towards a
breaking point and a descent into chaos.’

Social,
cultural, political, climatic and economic crises which, insufficient
individually to damage the West other than locally, are combining, according to
Faye, to produce a perfect storm of dysfunction leading to ‘the economic
collapse of Europe, the world’s foremost economic power, [which] will bring
down the United States and other advanced economies.’ [Why We Fight]

Faye
is actually very optimistic about what will emerge from this chaos, but he is
adamant that it is the myth of the Phoenix that will be required after a period
of reverse social evolution during which European nations will descend into ‘a
new Middle Ages.’

If
you seek Faye’s monument, look around you. If culture and politics are
inextricably interwoven, as Faye believed, then a brief appraisal of either
will lead you to the shocking state of the other. Politics has becomes a
laboratory staffed by technocratic charlatans using the rest of us – the
non-elites – as its experimental subject matter. Our culture could have as its
figurehead a buffoon in big trousers with gold teeth, a brand logo tattooed on
his forehead and a misspelled profanity shaved into his hair.

But
the conventional media are not interested in the dark times which may lie
ahead. Their amockalypse is always a short remove from entertainment. This is
exemplified by the – apparently true – tale of a BBC reporter emailing a member
of IS for comments on the Robin Williams film Jumanji. One suspects that, if a radioactive suitcase bomb
detonated tomorrow morning in London,
the Evening Standard would, later the
same day, run a feature on how Simon Cowell was dealing with it. While the
media juggle the amockalyptic issues of the week, they pay the minimum of
attention to other trends, other historical movements and formations.

Immersed
as I am in Julian Young’s masterful biography of Nietzsche, I am minded of the
German’s sustaining belief that we should look to the Greeks for our civil and
social models. To appeal to the Greeks for advice is also to appeal to their
myths and legends. If today’s Cassandras both exist primarily in the
unsanctioned regions of the internet, and also turn out to be correct, we must
remind ourselves that no one paid any attention to Cassandra. Nor to Faye.
Also, Cassandra was blinded. While Faye retained his sight, he was still
branded a heretic by the new soft totalitarians. Michael O’Meara, Faye’s loyal
translator and exegete, writes of Faye’s book (untranslated at present) La Colonisation de l’Europe that;

‘[The
book’s] characterisation of Europe’s
Islamisation, in anticipating 9/11 and other Muslim assaults, earned Faye and
his publisher a 300,000 franc fine and a year’s suspended sentence.’ [Preface
to Why We Fight]

As
Orwell writes, ‘[i]n times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a
revolutionary act’. For Faye, ‘the courage to tell the truth mutates into a
cardinal sin.’ [ibid.]

Very
few of Faye’s works are translated into English but, at the end of Archeofuturism, he indulges in sheer,
fictional futurology, depicting his convergence of catastrophes as a drama set
in what was at the time of writing several decades away, but is now imminent
(fictionally speaking). If Faye is right, it is the chorus who were blind, not
Cassandra;

‘In
June 2015, the President of the IMF uttered words that are now part of history:
“This is not an economic crisis. This is not a recession. This is the end of
the modern world: this is the apocalypse.”

The
Indian girl smiled. “That was the gods’ will”.’

Faye
may be wrong. Time will tell us. We must, unless we are nihilists, hope that he is, for his message is as simple as it is stark.